Description
Legitimacy, or rather the practice of legitimation, is fundamental to crafting the space to govern. Legitimation infuses power with symbolic capital, fusing norms, institutions and material resource, rendering such power (ephemerally) authoritative. This of course does not just pertain to formalized political institutions but also to informal governing practices in everyday life by the ascendant ‘non-state’. This paper sets out a conceptual framework for understanding how non-state actors legitimate their authority to act within contemporary, ‘multiple’ configurations of governance in selected African contexts. Specifically, we bring key debates around the legitimation practices of non-governmental, non-for-profit organizations versus legitimation of for-profit companies (often ensconced in Corporate Social Responsibility [CSR]) into dialogue. We thus attend to legitimation’s inherent multiplicity, heightened further by Africa’s ‘mobilities’ (as elsewhere), whereby the constant inward and outward flows of ideas, people and things engender new symbolic and material assemblages (and assemblers) through which the legitimation of public authority is negotiated. New, or returning, actors in some African contexts such as Chinese interventions via ‘development’ or business philanthropy via CSR, open up new fronts of legitimation whereby shifting ideas collide, adapt, are appropriated or contested within multiple African realities via a multiplicity of makers.
